By Bob Thompson, CustomerThink Corp.
When times get tough, it’s tempting to put “customer-centricity” on the back burner. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Below are a few tips on how to weather the economic storm:
Reach Out
Do you know what’s driving your customer decisions now? If not, reach out to your customers and have a real dialog with them. You may find that they’re looking for a better deal, but dig deeper and you’ll discover that experiences are still important and can swing decisions in your favor and help retain customers. Show them you care. Learn what’s most important in the solutions they need. These conversations will not only help you make better decisions during the downturn but will also strengthen relationships that will pay off in the future.
Fix Lose-Lose Problems
Budgets cuts may be a painful reality, so instead of building a customer experience plan around growing revenue, build it around efficiency and retention. For example, advanced analytics tools can help you ‘mine’ customer feedback to get to the root cause of what’s frustrating your customers and costing you money.
Personalize the Business Case
When it comes time to allocate funds, many customer-centric champions find themselves face-to-face with executives asking: “Why should I do this?” and “Who else is on board?” In other words, is the initiative going to help a key functional area, and is that manager willing to back the effort? To succeed, get the key people involved to believe that the project will be personally helpful to them.
Now What?
Once you have funding, the next step is to consistently deliver a more effective and efficient experience. As part of this, remember to give appropriate tangible and intangible rewards to encourage the behavior you seek.
Bob Thompson is CEO of CustomerThink Corp., an independent research and publishing firm focused on customer-centric business management, and founder of CustomerThink.com.
(Adapted from my article “Building the Case for Customer-Centricity: How to Make Your Customers and the CFO Happy“)
